We’re all gamers
(Please note: This is a modified version of the paper that won me an award from TPS in July’14.)
According to the Global Burden of Disease study, in 2010 overweight and obesity were estimated to cause 3.4 million deaths, 3.9% of years of life lost, and 3.8% of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) worldwide. It has also been shown that in the UK, 67% of men and 57% of women are either overweight or obese.
Furthermore, there is a 12.5% difference in productivity between exercising and non-exercising employees and increased activity levels are proven to reduce absenteeism at work.
How can we inspire and motivate more people to think about how actively they spend their time?
Understand that we are all gamers. People love games: from Monopoly to Sudoku to FarmVille. The same game mechanics that make us more alert, engaged, interested, and more motivated, can also be used in a generally non-gamified context, like exercising.
At Yomp, we help organisations engage their staff with the goal of exercising more frequently. We do it by offering an online, client-branded portal and mobile app which allows employees to log their activities, track their stats, compete with colleagues, form teams and ultimately win prizes or give donations to charity for their efforts. In turn this allows the organisations to specifically report on increased wellbeing of their workforce, providing key corporate and social responsibility statistics.
What is gamification?
Over one hundred years ago, Cracker Jack started placing a toy in each box of their breakfast cereals to reward children for eating more of their product. Since then, countless businesses have used games, toys and other kinds of fun as a means of selling and promoting their products.
Moving this idea into the 21st century, gamification has become the use of digital game elements and game-design techniques in non-game contexts.
Since the now popular TED talks focusing on the use of game mechanics, the “gamification industry” has grown because a significant amount of companies have adopted these strategies as a means of increasing engagement with their employees, customers and users.
What can gamification be used for?
According to Buck Consultants, over two-thirds of employers consider gamification an effective strategy for encouraging their employees to improve their health and more than 30% of employers intend to adopt a minimum of one health-focused gamified strategy in the next year. The prominence of this market has seen a huge influx of gamification in a wide variety of companies such as Nike, Coke-Cola, Kellogg’s, McDonalds, Microsoft to name just a few.
The particular branch of gamification Yomp use is called behaviour-change gamification that seeks to form beneficial new habits among a targeted audience. Behaviour-change gamification can involve anything from encouraging people to make better health choices, such as eating better or working out more often, to building systems that help people save more money for retirement. Generally, these new habits produce desirable societal outcomes: less obesity, lower medical expenses, a more effective educational system, and better financial decisions.
How do Yomp implement gamification?
Successful implementation of gamification requires a number of key objectives to be outlined in order to target the desired behavioural change.
Step 1: Define main objectives
Yomp’s main objective is to get more people exercising more often.
Step 2: Delineate target behaviours
It is important to focus on the desired behavioural change in order to put in the correct means of measurement in place. Since behaviours and metrics are best considered together, Yomp’s target behaviours are concrete and specific. Some of the examples include:
- Sign up for an account on the website
- Log an activity at least once a week
- Create a goal
- Take part in a competition
- Form or join a team
- Share your experiences on Facebook or Twitter
Step 3: Describe the users
It is important to remember that real people use these systems. It sounds obvious, but it is easily overlooked and something that it is very hard to rectify. It’s important to know who the users are and anticipate and understand what their needs are and will be moving forward. It is important that the information captured is carefully analysed to provide the most relevant experience to users throughout the lifecycle of the product.
Step 4: Devise Activity / Engagement Cycles
There are two kinds of ‘activity cycle’ used on the Yomp platform: engagement loops and progression stairs. Engagement loops describe, at micro level, what users do, why they do it, and what the system does in response. Progression stairs give a macro perspective on the ‘player’s’ journey. It’s important to get these cycles right as getting them wrong means you risk undoing any behavioural change already achieved and potentially loosing the interest of the user fulltime.
Step 5: Don’t forget the fun
Before a gamification solution is implemented it is important to take a step back and as a simple question: is it fun? Fun isn’t easy to predict, but the best way to tell if the system is fun is to build it, test it and refine it though a rigorous design systems. Yomp has gone through a number of phases in order to produce products that work for the specific audiences they are asked to cater for.
Step 6: Deploy the Appropriate Tools
The last stage is to pick the appropriate game mechanics, components and elements and deliver them through an effective mechanism. Yomp are very careful about which elements are selected, constantly bearing in mind that the user experience should be fun and motivating to encourage increased usage. It is as refined balance of various elements that helps create a successful system.
Does it really work?
Yomp has based their latest product release on a variety of different applied theories, putting them to the test in a notable case study that I will explore later.
Firstly the science:
- The Fogg Behaviour Model – developed in 2011 by B.J. Fogg indicates that behaviour change occurs once triggered only when motivation levels are high and/or when users’ ability to complete a task is increased.
The Tools:
- Increase motivation: Yomp have used a number of gamification tools such as: badges, goal setting, tracking progress, leader boards and friendly competition with colleagues.
- The ability to share achievements: Links with Facebook and Twitter encourage teams through social interaction
- Reward: Discounts in local shops and restaurants based on your Yomps (points collected) are also very powerful extrinsic motivators
- Inform: Yomp provide a lot of information on how to get started and prepare for various activities such as cycling e.g. what bike to select and what clothing.
- Triggers: Yomp use a number of triggers such as nudge emails; competitions and challenges to stimulate the desirable behaviour change.
- Self-Determination Theory – this theory developed by Edward Deci, Richard Ryan and their collaborators suggests that human beings are inherently proactive, with a strong internal desire for growth, but that their external environment must support this, otherwise these internal motivators will be thwarted. SDT indicates that these needs fall into three categories: competence, relatedness, and autonomy.
- Competence, or mastery, means being effective in dealing with the external environment: learning how to cycle, route planning, preparing appropriate clothing.
- Relatedness involves social connection and the universal desire to interact with and be involved with family, friends, colleagues and others.
- Autonomy is the innate need to feel in command of one’s life and to be doing what is meaningful (getting healthier, reducing the impact on the environment, saving money).
According to the theory, tasks that implicate one or more of these innate human needs tend to be intrinsically motivated. In other words, people will do them for their own sake. It is our job to boost these motivators and make them easier to feel and achieve.
How Yomp worked @ Dentsu Aegis Network
Dentsu Aegis Network is one of the largest global media umbrellas in the world. Following a localised trial of the Yomp system in one of their London offices they decided to expand it to their offices around the world.
Dentsu Aegis Network implemented a number of different elements including intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in order to engage with their workforce. As a company they were particularly interested in the CSR statistics the Yomp system captured by tracking the activity of the users.
The rewards they chose to implement were that of a philanthropic nature as well as conventional, pulling in various elements of the gamification theories previously mentioned. The company offered extrinsic rewards such as free coffees based on number of journeys and charity donations based on each mile an employee cycled.
The overall outcome of this is that the Yomp system gave Dentsu Aegis Network the opportunity to promote:
– Philanthropic aspirations, donating money to Save the Children
– Offering their employees reward for acting sustainably
– Encouragement through the built in intrinsic tools within the Yomp system — Quantifiable CSR statistics and marketing opportunities
Conclusion
Gamification can be highly influential when it comes to affecting people’s everyday habits. People are gamers and like to get kudos from other players, earn points for their efforts or batter themselves in a friendly competitive way. When designed correctly, gamification uses the same principles as games to engage people in activities they would have otherwise struggled to be engaged in.
The volume of investment going into the sector is a clear indication that the appetite both in terms of consumers and suppliers / employers / authorities is growing. With people’s exercise habits beginning to positively shift gamification shows signs of being an important method in assisting the change and seeing that it is not simply a step but rather a component to long-term success.
